I bet you didn’t realize that conservative media was to blame for Mitt Romney’s loss by about 3% of the total vote, much closer in swing states.

That’s the story line at Buzzfeed Politics, How The Conservative Media Lost The Election. It is a story with barely a dissenting voice. Buzzfeed fails to make any distinctions between large conservative media outlets (e.g., National Review, The Weekly Standard, and The Daily Caller) and the conservative blogosphere, and most important, does not make the connection to Romney’s loss.

“Conservative media could have done better” does not equal “Conservative media lost the election for the Republicans.”

Buzzfeed quotes three reasonable people on the subject — Dan Riehl, Ben Domenech, and John Podhoretz — each of whom weighs in with thoughts on what we could have done better, and Monday morning quarterbacking on whether the focus on Obama’s past was effective.

Nothing wrong with that in isolation; reflection after a loss is a good thing. But Buzzfeed uses that reflection to make a point the people it quotes do not make — that somehow conservative media caused the loss.

“I think the right media may have erred,” Dan Riehl, a contributor to Breitbart News and longtime proprietor of Riehl World News, told BuzzFeed a week after the election. “I think we let Obama get into our heads and we wound up campaigning against him, rather than for the things we believe in.”

One of the failures of Mitt Romney from the start of the primaries was to make the case for Mitt Romney, rather than against other candidates. Large conservative media outlets went along, bashing the crap out of Newt, who was the only serious challenger to Romney. There is a huge distinction to be made between the National Reviews and Jennifer Rubins of the world and the conservative base bloggers who pointed out the problem with nominating a candidate whose only reason to be was a questionable narrative of electability.

Once the general election started, the conservative blogs fell into line behind the nominee, joining with the larger outlets. But was it conservative media’s collective obligation in the general election to make the positive case for a candidate we supported not because we supported him but because he was not Barack Obama?

Mitt Romney needed to make the case for Mitt Romney, and he didn’t until that first debate. Even then, it was too little, too late.

Buzzfeed then focuses on whether we spent too much time complaining about media which were cheerleaders for Obama.

Some conservative writers now worry that their media outlets spent too much time poking and prodding old-guard journalistic institutions rather than digging up dirt on the Obama administration.

“My impression from the outside was that the target of the vetting effort was always the mainstream media, not really the president,” said Ben Domenech, a conservative blogger and co-founder of the long-running conservative blog RedState.com.

Domenech said conservative coverage of Obama’s first term drifted “too often toward entertainment and mockery, and too little toward the critical and hard work of investigation.”

“I think it’s a bit disappointing that the major scandals during Obama’s administration thus far have all been broken by mainstream media entities, not journalists on the right,” he added.

I’m not sure to which “major scandals” Ben is referring. It seems that Fox News pushed the hardest on Fast and Furious and Benghazi, and conservative media fought pretty hard to expose the failures of the Stimulus and to expose Obamacare’s inherent flaws. Those narratives were crushed by the mainstream media’s love affair with Obama, but that hardly is the fault of conservative media.

There are structural faults in the conservative media, for sure. Too much opinion and commentary, not enough digging for original news. But it would not have made a difference anyway in this cycle; other than Fox News, there is no mainstream media which will cover stories broken by the conservative media.

Buzzfeed saves its real ire for Breitbart.com, with which Buzzfeed has a feud:

The consensus soon emerged on the right was that if Americans were fully aware of Obama’s relationship with extremists like Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, they never would have elected him. And since tank-dwelling mainstream reporters couldn’t be trusted to expose The Real Obama, it would be left to the crusading online right to get the job done.

Breitbart News efficiently captured this sentiment with a mission statement earlier this year, where they promised to “vet the president.” …

The mission of the conservative media, then, became less to “stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!'” — as National Review‘s founding editor famously put it — and more to stand athwart the New York Times White House coverage, yelling “Biased!”

Buzzfeed presents a similar narrative for The Daily Caller.

The focus by Breitbart.com and The Daily Caller on Obama’s past may not have played out as well as anticipated — and Buzzfeed worked pretty hard to make sure that was the case. But I give them credit for trying, although I do fault The Daily Caller for its late-inning, over-hyped old video of Obama.

John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a prolific tweeter, rejected the notion that Obama’s reelection represented a failure of the conservative media. But he said that as the GOP tries to widen its tent in the coming months and years, conservative sites will need to stay out of the way — or better yet, cheer on the effort.

He singled out RedState.com, which has earned credibility on the right, in part, by targeting vulnerable moderates in Republican primaries, and directing grassroots readers to defeat them. Podhoretz warned against the site’s “hunger and desire to establish an ideological party line and draw boundaries around it, and say anyone who’s not in this line should not be elected and should be destroyed.”

“A deliberate choice is going to have to be made,” he said. “Is RedState a news and information website, or is it an activist partisan Republican website pushing specific politicians? Regrettably, right now I think it’s more the latter than the former.”

Why must there be uniformity in the conservative media? What’s wrong with an outlet like Red State taking a harder line than Commentary?

In the end, what you have in the Buzzfeed article is second guessing. Nothing wrong with that.

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Comments

1. Fox News is not “conservative media”. They simply run counter to the Collectivist propaganda machine. They are the only media outlet (besides CBS fitfully) to give time to F&F and Benghazi. Some of their commentators DO good work for conservative thought, however.

2. We generally need to effectively convey the superior message and vision we have for and to America. There are a LOT of people producing excellent stuff along these lines. Individually, WE have to get it in front of the people we contact. We also have to find a way to effectively get it broadcast.

3. Mark Steyn pointed out something that was a mild…and unwelcome…epiphany to me recently. One reason Conservatives LIKE polls of likely voters is that they reflect a SMALLER population averse to our thinking. Or, polls of Americans generally show majorities who OPPOSE our values.

4. These people are CONSUMERS of media, and they support the Collectivist propaganda machine.

5. The way to attack HAS to include popular culture, since that is the way so many Americans get any idea of what the ideas and issues in play actually are. Conservatives have almost no presence in this arena, outside of books and some very limited music.

So much post-election analysis is anecdotal. The are more opinion writers than I can ever remember before, and if you are writing in the mainstream you don’t even have to be thorough at this point.

What about a few hard pieces of data and fact? For example, the Pew Research study that finds the media made a HUGE and miraculous shift to very positive on Obama and negative on Romney at the very end? No surprise that MSNBC was 100% on both sides of that coin (all positive for Obama, all negative for Romney). That is infinitely more powerful than a years’ worth of blogging in my mind. And it is just ONE example.

Applying this rule we can safely assume that any advice we get from Buzzfeed is likely the opposite of what we should be doing. Put another way, if Buzzfeed says conservative media is a problem then what we really need is lots more conservative media.

We lost because we had a myopic, uninspiring and nonfeasant candidate who missed a barn-door opportunity history offers once in a lifetime and which a nation cannot afford to miss. Candidates lead, we follow. That’s how it works. In the formula implied through this criticism, even if we’d won — through the heroic support and flanking actions of our media — we’d still be stuck with a weak and astigmatic president destined to repeat the same mistakes which led to the rise of the Left in the first place.

“Conservative moonpony” is a strawman, a silly construct that deflects attention from not only of Romney’s inadequacy but the failures of the Establishment to understand and confront the “Collective.” The alternative is not a moonpony, but a vigorous, incisive and comprehensive challenge to the “Collective” reality. This is the highest and most necessary obligation of the Republican.

The assertion that that there was nothing Romney could have done or not done is hollow and defeatist, as well as unprovable on the face of it, because Romney didn’t even attempt an alternative to a stiff and cautious 1950s campaign of economic generalities that abjectly denied or ignored (more aptly criminally neglected to address) the Collective reality in the media, culture and politics. His failures of expression and engagement were overwhelming, and enervating to the conservative electorate, beyond the repair of any support efforts by friendly media.

“The alternative is not a moonpony, but a vigorous, incisive and comprehensive challenge to the “Collective” reality. This is the highest and most necessary obligation of the Republican.”
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Which I thought, within the realm of picking your fights, R&R DID do.

ObamaCare…dead.

Jobs…fostering the market.

Taxes…reform.

Entitlements…reform.

Immigration…control.

Energy…go get it!

Regulation…cut it back.

“The assertion that that there was nothing Romney could have done or not done is hollow and defeatist, as well as unprovable on the face of it…”
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If you want to argue, use my post to argue from. Could Romney have taken California? New York? No. And THAT was plainly what I said.

“His failures of expression and engagement were overwhelming, and enervating to the conservative electorate…”
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Really!?!? YOU might have been enervated. That seems to be you native mood.

I was excited to vote for TWO good man who respected the law, had a HUGE background of substantial work and achievement, and were APPARENTLY dedicated to reform. Who conspicuously LIKE the Constitution.

I was also ANIMATED and determined to end the ObamaBanana Republic, the reign of outlawry at Justice, and the crushing of our Republic, etc, etc.

But there were MORE of THEM than there are of me, and they were turned out and voted.

If you are not listening to Limbaugh, you should be. He is reciting data, and synthesizing it. Our problem was not Romney. It runs MUCH deeper than a single candidate.

Our problem WAS Romney, AND the problems run much deeper. Both things are true and bound together; Romney was the natural and inevitable product of those deeper failures. He embodied them, chief of which is a particular failure by the Establishment GOP to recognize the nature and intentions of the Left and take a battle against it into the open marketplace.

Romney’s campaign failed in almost every conceivable way to confront the Left and media. He ran a disciplined and monotonously thematic economic campaign wildly out of place in our cultural and media farrago saturated in leftist narratives. His opportunities were incalculable, his failures equally so. Given where we are in our culture after the long siege by the Left, with all that Breitbart and others have taught us over the last few years, Romney’s negligence was nearly unimaginable. As Gingrich has pointed out, when did he actually challenge the media? And why was he refusing to appear on all the programs that might have reached the Collective audience? Focusing instead on losing his conservative base?

Discussing California and New York is disngenuous. The difference in this election was narrow and waged in swing states where Romney had no business losing to Obama.

Limbaugh did untold damage with his SLUT comment. Fluke’s argument was essentially very weak .It was open to several attacks eg Fluke was a faux advocate for a faux committee with faux arguments with faux subject. just where was her friend with the denied hormonal $3000 pa treatment?

It was obvious to everyone Fluke is a lesbian. Her later attempts at dressing girlie were mucho bizarro .

Mitt Romney lost the election because of Mitt Romney. Face it folks. Romney’s “47%” remark (although basically true) should not have been talked about at a fundraiser where Jimmy Carter’s grandson ended up recording the event. Also, remember when Romney said he “didn’t care about the poor” because they had a safety net? Yes, the poor do have a safety net, but a presidential candidate shouldn’t go on public record saying he didn’t care about low-income Americans. It made Romney appear “out of touch” and as someone who lacked empathy.

You know what else caused his defeat? He didn’t really reach out to blacks or Latinos for their vote. He made a paltry attempt to reach out to blacks by speaking at an NAACP conference but was basically booed for his effort. That’s because blacks perceived Romney as wanting to take things away from them, while Obama was perceived as doing just the opposite. Needless to say, Obama received 95% of the black vote. That means that the Christian black community mostly overlooked Obama’s ‘abortion on demand’ mandate and his recent support of ‘same sex marriage’ which the Bible plainly condemns [homosexuality], and therefore, by voting for Barack Obama, blacks were basically voting “against” Jesus. Sad, but true.

Also, Romney’s policy on immigration reform i.e. have 12-18 million illegals self-deport – which was actually a good idea – but when you realize millions of ‘legal’ Latino residents in the U.S. have millions of “illegal” relatives wanting to come to America) it was a no-brainer for them to vote for Obama because Obama wants everybody and his uncle to come to America – no matter how they get here – including Obama’s own uncle, who is also here illegally and remains in the country even though he was recently charged with a DUI. Therefore, Latinos overwhelmingly voted for Santa Claus, er, for Barack Obama.

If America continues to go “downhill” under Obama’s second term = hopefully people’s eyes will finally be opened to the reckless policies and basic incompetence that the Democrat Party continues to exhibit under liberal “progressive” initiatives, which are basically bankrupting the nation, while at the same time, strangling the economy and ruining America’s reputation around the world.

If the pain rises to unsustainable thresholds under an Obama second term, Republicans and conservatives should do everything possible to reach out to those disenchanted Americans who are finally fed up with failed liberal policies and hopefully will be able to win them over. Because, as we know, conservatism has the winning argument and the realistic policies to help bring America back from the brink, which as we also know, Barack Obama and liberalism in general have taken America down a path of ruination as the direct result of liberalism’s failed socialistic policies and other bad ideas.

You know who lost the election? — Mitt Romney, and the GOP leadership. The Romney campaign was more concerned with keeping its head low, than stating the obvious. It was incredible to watch the gross incompetence of the people running the show. (The only challenge the Democrats had was Obama’s own incompetence, witness the debates. Other than that, they vomited lies all over a cowering Romney, and of course they stuck.)

Also to blame is the entrenched and equally incompetent GOP leadership. You’ll note that Boehner did not even campaign for Romney! — Either did Eric Cantor! Bums, the lot of them.

The GOP’s haughty, overpaid, sleazy ‘advisers’ are consistent losers, with very big mouths, more concerned with their time on talk shows than in winning elections — which they do not know how to do.

The conservative blogosphere campaigned hard against Romney because he was a weak candidate whose “vision” was, “Newt is the Devil. Vote for me ’cause I’m not Newt.”

But the MSM and big-time “Conservative” media (the juveniles at NRO, the snobs at American Spectator, the pompous know-it-alls (Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham, etc.) of talk radio) forced Romney onto us. So, as the Professor says, conservative bloggers fell into line behind him.

Establishment types even jeered at Conservatives for “hypocrisy,” we were against Romney in the Primaries but fell into line behind him. In fact, we were fighting hard for him while the same Establishment jerks who forced Romney onto us were conceding the election in August.

The problem isn’t the conservative blogosphere or conservatism in general. The problem is that the Republican Party is a House Divided, pitted against an unstoppable, omnipotent Democrat juggernaut whose invincibility is a direct result of Establishment cowardice.

A House Divided cannot stand. The intolerance of Establishment lefties is the problem: they hate conservatives but count on our vote as of right, while not giving a damn what we think. It’s hard to figure which is more insulting. Something has to give, but it’s not the conservative blogosphere.

Another thing — it is amazing that the GOP leadership displays any courage is in attacking conservatives.

We need to starve this organization so as to flush out the rats leading it — then take it over. How big donors would give a dime to the GOP amazes me. Their money would be much better spent on grassroots organizations and alternative media, such as this blog. (That is, if they want to win. Who knows what’s in their minds anymore.)

The incentives for the campaign professionals has to change. Donors need to understand where campaign dollars are spent while consultants need to be placed on a performance pay system.

Currently campaign consultants get a commission on all the ad buys they place. The quality of the ads and the wisdom of their placement matters less to the consultants’ bottom line than the total spent on media. It explains why the DC based consultants talk up those candidates most likely to raise the big $$$$$. It also explains why they might prefer a few low production cost negative ads placed around national network news shows as opposed to many more carefully crafted ads meticulously targeted to much smaller cable audience – and to alternative forms of outreach.

It certainly explains why Obama had the Olympics and numerous other high-viewership important events all to himself. I was enraged and frustrated by the failure of the “Romney team” (or should I say, “exploitation team taking Romney’s money”) to exploit such magnificent opportunities.

I’ve concluded that these GOP consultants don’t give a damn about winning. In fact, they might even prefer to lose. No pressure, big bucks.

And the Establishment RINOs are complete fools to keep hiring these incompetent mountebanks.

The problem wasn’t the conservative media. The problem is how to reach low information voters – the people who don’t even know who Andrew Breitbart was and who don’t do Drudge.

The other side’s message is so ingrained in the popular culture many people don’t even realize how much of it they have absorbed. Many low information voters instinctively know something is wrong. The wrong direction surveys shows that. Many even reject a large part of the media culture. Unfortunately because these people do not seek out political information they almost never hear the positive side of a conservative message.

The fragmenting of the media makes it ever harder to reach such voters. Today’s mega-hits have viewership numbers that would have meant instant cancellation when our choices were limited to three networks

Obama’s people did a superior job reaching these lower information voters by advertising outside the traditional placements for political ads. Many of them couldn’t be convinced to vote for Obama again, but he didn’t need them to do so. With his 90% totals in the urban core all Obama had to do was convince enough unhappy suburbanites and white working class voters to stay home and he’d win.

JT hits a very salient point here.
IMO the media also framed it as a take from them (those evil rich people) and give to you election. and people chose stealing from others instead of being responsible for their own failures.

I’m certainly not a political scientist, but the shortcoming of Romney/GOP is really not that complicated. In a war, you never let your enemy set the rules of engagement. You also make sure you know who the enemy is. Romney and the GOP allowed the media and the left to frame the issues, i.e., “war on women” “taxcuts for the rich”, “fair share”, “R’s are anti-immigrant”, etc.

The left/media lives by Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals. They frame the issues. They set the rules of engagement. That must change.

What was this, like some kind of revelation after the fact? We totally purchased this, we ate the entire enchilada, up front and obvious. And now we’ve decided we F’ed up?

I’ve been saying all along until I’m blue in the face, yes Obama sucks bilge water but Obama is not the problem. America is the problem. Liberals are the problem. The problem are the people who voted FOR Obama.

Politics isn’t that much different than business in this regards. You can call a customer misinformed but they are never wrong and they certainly are never stupid. It’s the same with voters. Treating voters as wrong headed or stupid is a sure fire way to lose every future election.

Newt has some interesting things to say about the Romney and the Republican’s in general failure to engage the popular culture and the media this election cycle.

It was like saying we shouldn’t be doing “outreach”, we should be inclusive.

Implicit in that is that we are not. Which is BS. It is very like saying “compassionate conservative”. We ARE inclusive, and we ARE compassionate.

What Romney said had nothing to do with voters being wrong-headed or stupid…though many are both. It had to do with where he intended to put the resources he had, in recognition that some portion (in which he was wrong) were essentially bought off.

Gingrich is absolutely correct about Romney’s reluctance to appear on certain shows. That is how you reach low information voters these days. Also the perception of inclusiveness was not there and it’s perceptions that matter. For example, Romney mostly used surrogates for his Hispanic outreach. George W. Bush made a point of appearing before Hispanic audiences himself.

This “electorate was bought off” stuff is nonsense. It is a fig-leaf for Romney-pushers to rationalize their hero’s defeat after they cleared the way for him by trashing every other contender.

Politics is a marketplace. Democrats understand that; they go get the votes where they can find ’em. Republicans think it’s beneath them, including (unforgivably) Tea Parties.

Obama got millions fewer votes than in 2008. That means lots of people weren’t buyin’ what he was sellin’.

Romney got roughly the same number of votes as McCain,if you reckon in the probable massive voter fraud, well short of Bush in ’04. He had a perfect set-up and still lost.

Newt was demonized for asking questions about Romney at Bain. We’re seeing why the push-back was so shrill: Romney was probably the famous-name empty-suit figurehead. How else to explain his utterly botched campaign, from failure to exploit opportunities to the contemptible failure of his GOTV.

A large portion of the American electorate are complete idiots. I know many of these Obama supporters personally. No amount of self-flagellation on our part will dissuade them from their idiocy.

Romney’s campaign was more than good enough and he would have been a great president. The productive class supported him. He ran a campaign based on what America once was and needs to be again. I am OK with that. The only way to engage the grievance mongers is to play their game and I have no interest in that.

All this talk of amnesty and agreeing to tax increases will cause me to disengage. Rubio and Jindal won’t change any minds on the left but they will lose people like me if they continue down this path.

The Republican’s lost the election because Mitt Romney has no ideological convictions. We knew that going in.

Republicans lost the election because we permitted the liberal MSM to invade and run 20 presidential primary debates. We had too many debates and too many candidates and the MSM made sure the debates focused on nonsensical liberal issues. When will we ever learn.

We need to run Sarah Palin in 2016. BTW, “Sarah Palin: The Undefeated” is available on NetFlix. If you have not watched it, now is the time – it certainly was good for my post-election blues. It is 2 hours long, but you will not get out of your seat.

One problem is that conservative arguments put forward conclusions, big broad statements, opinions—“He’s against (fill in)”… “I’m for (fill in)” … “My policies will (fill in).” Frankly, it got Just Plain Boring. “Jobs” is perfect example. The lack of jobs is NOT the problem, it is a SYMPTOM of the problem. The tax code and the role of government ARE the problems. But all anyone ever said is my way will save/create jobs. Did Romney ever do better than after the second debate when he made it personal?

It wasn’t personal. Specifics were almost never provided. Otherwise, when Governor Walker spelled out the details in Wisconsin it infuriated Democrats (everywhere), unions and their stooges (everywhere), teachers (everywhere), and their puppet politicians in the Wisconsin legislature. The fight got ugly but he stayed the course and prevailed. Hate him or not, Chris Christie did the same thing in New Jersey. Who can forget him holding up the connected forefinger and thumb fingertips signaling “zero,” the amount teachers paid for their medical coverage? The same with his argument for killing the boondoggle commuter tunnel project that connected a place no one was with a place no one was going, on which millions had been spent, absolutely nothing had been accomplished, and billions (with a B) more would be. Teachers now contribute (a pittance) toward their medical insurance premiums and the tunnel project disappeared with barely a whimper.

Make it personal, keep it personal, be specific. Hostess is a recent example. The broad, glowing moral arguments are “union busting,” “greedy management,” “jobs.” The professor himself did a long piece about a roguish white knight yesterday in defense of capitalists and investment bankers. However, I’ve only come across one piece, only one, that disclosed even cursorily the blatant stupidity of the work rules and outlandish specifics of the union contracts involved. Retaining any of them in exchange for saving Hostess will be nothing more than GM writ small, regardless of who does it. Disclosing details of those work rules and practices would have been a better use of the space by conservatives, here and everywhere else.

Make it personal. Name names. Be specific. Quote the regulation. Draw the picture. Don’t stop.

I felt alot like a Thanksgiving turkey after the election – carved up neatly with a huge knife by my liberal friends. Even my fellow conservatives threw me over the gravy boat, saying Romney wasn’t conservative enough. Like giblets, I feel pretty useless as a voter today since every last one of the people for whom I campaigned and gave money to L-O-S-T. Good thing there’s always another election. I just can’t hash out the “why’s” of the loss yet, so pass the pie and ice cream. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

So half the political establishment, PLUS the media, PLUS the culture were constantly making the case for the collective, and yet you think Romney somehow failed by losing the election due to probably 400,000 votes in a few swing states ?

Your answer is, get a better candidate ? Do you have ANY prescription for the media and the culture that absolutely carried Obama over the top, despite the abject incompetence of his first term ?

I think we all agree Romney the RINO stunk and that the GOP hacks who saddled us with him stink as well.

But right now, here’s our reality: while Romney is fading as a memory, our reality is a limp noodle, talentless RINO named John Boehner who is hogging the GOP Speaker’s position, ready to sell us out so he can be happy as a Washington hack and be ‘liked’ by the NY Times and airheads of the likes of Diane Sawyer.

While we cannot re-do the election, we do have the power to boot Boehner out of the Speaker position and replace him with someone with guts and integrity.

That’s our problem how. — and that’s what we need to act on before it is too late.